Wall Street's Party

Well, you can scratch what I wrote in the last post. Turns out the Republicans are definitely going to carry Wall Street's water. I think what's most amazing to me about this is the type of mental (and moral) gymnastics Mitch McConnell, and his fellow 40 Senators, have to go through to actually pursue this strategy.

First of all they know America and Main Street are against the bailouts and angry at the banks. So the only way McConnell can defend Wall Street (and protect his hedge fund pals) is to paint FinReg as some sort of favor to the banks. In fact, he called it a 'permanent bailout' (and Matthew Yglesias notes that John Boehner joined the nonsense later as well).

Similarly, the banks are also going through some shameless moral gymnastics of their own. They know they're Public Enemy #1, but by enlisting McConnell's help it's obvious they don't care. They're happy to let McConnell disparage them to the taxpayers as long as they can keep fleecing the taxpayers.

I'm not sure if McConnell thinks the rest of the country is dumb enough to swallow this, but all-or-nothing strategies (see: Republicans, blockade of health care reform 2010) is the only way the GOP is playing these days. I guess we'll see how this strategy turns out for them in November.